UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

The Israeli prime minister dismissed criticism of Israel as an occupying country as “nonsense”. The comments made in the company of Likud officials on Sunday and reported by Israeli sources puts the Israeli premier at odds with international law and the rest of the world which views Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza as a military occupation.In comments that further reveal Netanyahu’s extreme position, the prime minister said that “empires have conquered and replaced entire populations and no one is talking about it.”

This is another one of those cases where the word genocide isn’t mentioned in the original report, however the conditions described amount to genocide:

More than a quarter of illnesses in Gaza are caused by water pollution, a new study has said, noting that this is the main cause of mortality in the coastal enclave that has endured an Israeli siege since 2007.

The study, which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a copy of, was carried out by RAND Corporation, an American NGO. It said that it reached these findings four years ago and that “since that time these numbers have continued to grow”.

Based on the report, Haaretz said that the collapse of water infrastructure has led to a sharp rise in germs and viruses such as rotavirus, cholera and salmonella.

The report said the situation is worsening due to repeated Israeli operations in Gaza which started in 2008.

… The study concluded that the current situation is that “Gaza is incapable of supplying enough water for its 2 million inhabitants”.

Group analyst Farhad Dalal has written of the way that manners, and social gossip, is generated by hegemonic groups to rationalise and police social relations of domination and subordination. His interest was primarily in the subtle devaluing of black people in white societies, but his insights are applicable in this context. While within Israel/Palestine, the protection and extension of Jewish privilege is ugly in the extreme, in the West it has been made impolite to say so. Acting in accordance with the universalist values that Western societies claim to champion, in relation to Israel/Palestine, has been rendered grounds for social exclusion. Etiquette is breached when someone steps out of line. Passively standing by in the face of an Apartheid social structure shorn up by an increasingly fascistic political culture appears more dignified than actions taken to challenge militarism or promote ethnic equality. It becomes offensive to point out how many of the components of a truly genocidal situation are active in the profoundly asymmetrical relationship between the Israeli State and the Palestinian people.

Regev, explained human rights activists, “has a long history of excusing, apologising and justifying [Israel’s] murder, torture and genocide as well as land theft from the indigenous population of Palestine.” They accused the library — which appears only to have disclosed Regev’s attendance after the event, fearing public outrage — of going “against everything the Linen Hall has stood for” and demanded an investigation into how the Israeli Ambassador was allowed to address the community in Belfast in such an “underhanded” way.

The drawn-out and ultimately fruitless “peace negotiations” demonstrate clearly that the far-right which governs Israel sees peace as a threat. Anti-Apartheid stalwarts, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have claimed — with good reason — that Israel’s version of Apartheid is worse than that endured by non-White people in South Africa. In reality, they recognise the genocidal nature of the self-declared Jewish state. Israel more than deserves its growing international pariah status.

Moshe Ya’alon, Israeli Defense Minister from 2002 to 2005, said that he is “proud” of being the official that killed the most Palestinians, according to Safa News agency.

After characterizing Palestinians and Arabs as “terrorists,” according to the Middle East Monitor, Ya’alon added that he topped the list among all Israeli government officials in killings of Palestinians during a meeting held in Herzliya over the weekend.

Former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak also boasted about the large number of Palestinians he had killed, according to Safa News. Between 2008 and 2014, Barack and Ya’alon led three major military offensives against Palestinians in Gaza. Some 4,000 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli occupation forces and over 20,000 were wounded.

We became half a million Jews in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and we will become one million,” Ariel said. “There will be only one state between the river and the sea which is the state of Israel. Unfortunately, some of the areas such as Jerusalem, Sinai, Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip are not in our hands.” The minister called for imposing “Jewish domination” over Al-Aqsa Mosque, stating that the “utmost goal” is to impose full domination over the holy city.

The chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in the Israeli parliament has asked if the Gaza Strip can be “thrown in the sea,” Shehab news agency reported on Monday. His question echoes that of the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Avi Dichter made his comment on Israel’s Channel 2 TV. “In 1992, before Oslo, there was a bloody wave of attacks from and in Gaza,” he explained. “At one of the meetings, Rabin entered and suddenly asked: ‘Let me know, can the Gaza Strip be cut with a saw and thrown in the sea?.. All of them looked at me because I was the Shabak [internal security agency] chief in Gaza and I said: ‘Mr Prime Minister, we are working on this.’

If Palestinians actually “existed” in Israel’s imagination, there can never be any moral justification for its creation; there will never be any Israeli narrative that could be powerful enough to rejoice at the birth of the Israeli “miracle” that “made the desert bloom”. That blood-stained birth callously required the destruction of an entire nation; people with a unique history, language, culture and collective memory. It was thus absolutely necessary for the Palestinians to be wiped out to quell any possible sense of Israeli guilt, shame and legal and moral responsibility for what has befallen millions of dispossessed people.

… Terms such as the “Jewish Nakba” are becoming omnipresent, in reference to the alleged ethnic cleansing of Arab Jews from their countries during the war of 1948. While the attempt to rewrite history is disingenuous at best, it signals the growing signs of defeat for the Israeli discourse. The term “Nakba” has proven to be too powerful a reference to the origins of Israel, established with genocidal intent and complete disregard for another nation.

Nevertheless, the Nakba must be in a constant process of re-evaluation and, if needed, redefinition. The Nakba is not merely a question of history, but an ongoing reality that has affected several generations of Palestinians.